Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 34

On conversations among ladies or discovering Mary McCarthy's The Group

So finally - finally - after reading about it over the years I got a copy of Mary McCarthy's The Group. Set in the 1930s, it follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates known collectively as "the group" as they make their way post 1933 graduation* through marriage, motherhood and/or career independence. They come together in groups large and small in NYC, dropping in and out of each others lives, being snarky and supportive depending on the situation. It sounds like nothing special and yet if you have read it then you know how gripping this book truly becomes as chapter after chapter reveals more and more about the characters. From Kay's hopeful and then devastating wedding to Priss's multiple miscarriages and then conflicted feelings about parenthood to Helene's determined stance on singlehood, Dottie's bad love affair and Polly's challenge with her father's psychological issues, everything the modern woman struggles with is in this book. The fact that it is set nearly eighty years ago means little, in fact in the face of the current birth control wars, the chapters on sex are all the more significant.

There were a couple of passages that stood out for me for different reasons. Here's a bit from a chapter on Libby who is working as a slush pile reader and freelance book reviewer for magazines and newspapers based in NYC. She was paid by the manuscript or review and here's how she saw the business:

The book-review editors were like kings (or queens), she always fancied, holding levees, surrounded by their courtiers, while petitioners waited eagerly in the anteroom and footmen (that is, office boys) trotted back and forth. And, like kings, they had power of life and death in their hands. She had got to know the other reviewers or "clients" as the Roman would have called them, quite well by site - middle-aged bohemian women with glasses or too much rouge and dangly earrings and worn briefcases or satchels; pimply young men in suits that looked as if they were made of paper....Among the book reviewers, there was a great deal of jealousy and spite; the young men with acne and eroded teeth always looked her up and down contemptuously and then positively hissed when she got ushered in ahead of them. Yet a lot of these would-be-reviewers were dishonest; instead of reviewing the book their object was to walk off with an armful and sell them to some little second-hand man without even looking at them. Which was unfair to the honest reviewer and even more so to the author and the publisher; any book that got published deserved the courtesy of a review.

So even in 1963, when The Group was first published, reviewers selling ARCs on the side was a problem!

On a more serious note, the chapter where Kay finds herself held in a psych ward is quite harrowing (and frustrating!) and this bit about the evolving view of relationships really struck me as well:

It was plain to Polly that many of her married classmates were disappointed in their husbands and envied the girls, like Helena, who had not got married. In June the class would have its fifth reunion and already it had its first divorcees. These hares were discussed wistfully by the tortoises of the class. It was felt that they at least "had done something".

What's interesting is that McCarthy is not advocating for singlehood over marriage - Polly in particular ends up quite happily married - but it is clear that the girls who married quickly, the ones who married with little idea beyond fairy tales images, were vastly disappointed. Clearly the author was cautioning that marriage was not the prize to be grabbed quickly, but rather something to be carefully considered. Again - timeless, advice for sure.

The other point McCarthy is making dwells on the conflict between education and societal expectation. These are women who often find themselves pretending to be inferior to their husbands and other men and wistfully recalling intellectual conversations in college. Their mothers seem to wish they had not gone; that life would have been happier without that door opened. Clearly McCarthy wanted to challenge this idea but she does not give a happy ending for everyone and leaves more than one of the group pondering what the true nature of happiness is. I can just imagine what they will be like when the 1950s hit.

Needless to say, I loved The Group from start to finish and can't wait to send a copy to my mother who is going to love it as well. Now, of course, I am well on my way to Mary McCarthy obsession and shall be reading many of her other books as well.



*McCarthy herself was a 1933 grad, following in the footsteps of her aunt and grandmother. Clearly, the book is quite autobiographical!

[Post pic of Vassar friends at Skinner Hall, 1939.]

Countering a Kirkus review

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony & Rodrigo Corral is a heavily illustrated book, an app and a website. (Which is actually on tumblr.) It is the big new thing in transmedia - a story that transcends multiple media formats and has been hailed by Kirkus as "Eerie and edgy--and effective as Poe". Well, that's some pretty high praise but just the mere idea of Chopsticks was enough to get me excited to read it. The book is the story of teen piano prodigy Glory who falls for new boy next door Francisco ("Frank"). They make mix CDs for each other, chat late at night, send back and forth youtube clips and drawings, etc. The book is designed around all these exchanges plus lots of other ephemera like photos, newspaper clippings and invites pertaining to Glory's performances, notes from school, etc. There is very little text - the whole thing is about the images which take the reader through the death years before of Glory's mother, her performances and European tour and growing love for Frank. Along the way we start to see Glory fall to pieces under performance pressure and she ends up in a rest facility making plans to run away with Frank. Then the authors toss out a big twist that is straight out of any gothic title ever written and there you go. That's the story.

I'm okay with using plot tropes from a zillion years ago because if done well any story will hold a reader's attention. What bothers me about Chopsticks though is I think it excels more as "the next big thing in storytelling" then an actual story. Glory is a cipher - you never really get in her head, there are no long diary entries or letters or emails to show how she feels only brief postcards about wanting to go home and missing Frank. Nothing emotionally affecting. I wanted to be inside this character's head - I needed to be - but the authors did not give me that perspective. So I never really cared about her which I think diminishes the story greatly because if you don't care about Glory then there isn't a whole lot else to the book.

I did not download the app (it costs money and there is a limit to my reviewing curiosity) but I have been to the website. I was thinking maybe it would have a diary to read or blog posts from Glory or her father or something similar but no - in fact the site is similar to many traditional book sites. There are embedded youtube videos, but you could visit them by typing in the text from the book. There are close-ups of items pictured in the book, but nothing additional. You don't get anything more about the characters from visiting this site. (Or if you do I missed it entirely.) The app apparently plays the music Glory & Frank talk about in the book but again, I could track that down on my own. Nice addition but it doesn't get me any further insight into what makes this girl tick and when all is said and done, that's what I needed.

I think Chopsticks is very pretty but suffers from a weak story. Other than the plot twist, I'm not seeing what makes the book memorable and more importantly even with the twist I did not care about this character. So, are the critics excited about it just because it is the first book from a major publisher to crossover from print to app and website? I give them points for making the extra effort but I think we all need to remember that without a strong story in the first place, none of the bells and whistles matter.

I am a person who likes going to the web to learn more after reading a book. Heck, after finishing THE GROUP last week I went looking for Mary McCarthy's house online. (It's in Seattle!) I read author interviews all the time, I like to see where books are set, I'm curious about who characters are based on. I love the idea of transmedia. But first, the story has to work and in the case of Chopsticks, I think the term "novel" widely exaggerated.

Sherman Alexie says it's okay to love Island of the Blue Dolphins

1. Sherman Alexie and Neko Case talk in the new issue of The Believer. (The coolness quotient here is about as high as it gets.) This part blew me away*:

One of the amazing things he did--I mean, I'll never forget this--I graduated college, couldn't get a job. So I ended up living back on the res. All that stuff about getting off, about going to college, about getting a new life, and there I was. I was twenty-three years old, living with my mom and dad on the res, with no job, poor again. And I couldn't even... I mean, I wrote this long, crazy poem-letter to Adrian, feeling sad and desperate. And I didn't mean it for anything other than to express what I was feeling and, uh... he sent back a fifty-dollar bill and he said, "Whatever else is going on, make sure that you keep buying typewriter ribbon."

As someone who moved back home at one point after college, and was depressed beyond words to be there, I know how amazing that letter must have been.

2. Also, see this report on a possible breakthrough for bees.

3. And Oddfellow's Orphanage sounds quite charming.

4. I donated to Planned Parenthood, have you?

5. Your Nome, Alaska trivia for the day: Anvil Mountain Correction Center is the farthest north prison in the US. It's a perfect place for a prison. Where on earth would you escape to?

6. Imelda May is my new music crush; listen & fall in love:

*The Adrian he refers to is Adrian Louis a Paiute Indian poet he had exchanged letters with in college.

Writers really are suprised sometimes

Jenny D. emailed me a question the other day about MAP and how I came to write about my father in the midst of a memoir of Alaska aviation. She posted my response which is more about the surprises writers find in the act of writing then anything else. I can chart exactly how my father's death came to be in this book (as I explained to Jenny) but while it seems obvious in retrospect, at the time it was utterly unexpected. I never really believed authors when they claimed to be surprised by their writing - I mean sure, you can change your mind along the way but being totally surprised by something you create? It didn't make any sense. And then, over the course, of a few days I wrote myself in and out of some memories that I never planned to revisit on the printed page.

I thus bow down to all authors everywhere who I previous scoffed at.

In other news, keep your eyes peeled for the new issue of Rolling Stone (with "The Voice" cast on the cover) for its truly unbelievable article about the cluster of suicides at a high school district in Michele Bachmann's area. It stretches the bounds of belief to know that GBLTQ teens could have been treated this way with the full complicity of school officials.

I have never believed more how much the "It Gets Better" project matters.

Winning ALA

Kelly has a long thoughtful post up at Stacked that I direct you to about the ethics of ARC-grabbing and selling that was partly prompted by activity at the recent ALA midwinter conference. This is not a new situation, it has been present at BEA and ALA in the past and simply seems to have reached new heights of pushiness in Dallas last week but it is something that bloggers need to be thinking about. Namely, when did, in this case, a professional conference where some of the most prestigious awards in publishing are awarded become about getting the biggest pile of free stuff? (And then selling them on Ebay.)

If you doubt me then head on over to google and type in "ALA Midwinter book haul". There are videos folks, not just blog posts with photos of stacks of books but even videos. Of course this should not surprise anyone as publishers have been exhibiting at ALA forever but still, the blatant book grabbing from so many nonlibrarians struck a chord with many attendees. The question has to be asked - is ALA about librarian business or free books obtained for personal profit and further, how did it ever come to this?

Part of this resonates so much with me because I actively try to reduce the number of ARCs that come to me. I prefer to receive only what I can review and I feel very strongly that this is what everyone should be doing. And that's not just some one paragraph summary and an "It was really good" type entry. We're talking an actual thoughtful review. On top of that I have been mightily frustrated for years by how publishers seem to be unwilling to do the work to get in the weeds and understand the good and bad side of book blogging. They need to take the time to hire people whose only jobs are dealing with online media. They need to pay them well so there is no continuous turnover (don't say it can't be done because places like Candlewick & First Second do it brilliantly) and they need to build relationships. They need to invest in learning the lit blogosphere and the sites and bloggers who best fit with their imprints.

But really, I digress.

On the one hand we have been rocked by yet more stories this week of how Amazon is killing publishing and the end of the industry as we know is looming large. On the other hand there are bloggers crowing from one end of the blogosphere to the other about their massive free book hauls from ALA and ARCs are already showing up on Ebay. In the middle are librarians who actually attended meetings at Midwinter and authors who are struggling to see where the return is from all these ARCs being grabbed with wild abandon. Will any of these bloggers do anything other than flash photos of their stacks or hold them up for videos? Is the "number of totes" competition the end goal now?

Fuck, what about reading thoughtfully and writing well and, I don't know, supporting our damn libraries?

So, go read what Kelly (a might fine librarian herself) has to say and join the conversation she has going. It's a worthy topic and well worth discussing.

Ms Bond has a story about a famous Lost Colony getting lost all over again...

1. I am delighted by the news from Gwenda Bond of the sale of her YA novel, Blackwood to Angry Robot (as part of a two book deal). Here is the summary:



On Roanoke Island, the legend of the 114 people who mysteriously vanished from the Lost Colony hundreds of years ago is just an outdoor drama for the tourists, a story people tell. But when the island faces the sudden disappearance of 114 people now, an unlikely pair of 17-year-olds may be the only hope of bringing them back.

Miranda, a misfit girl from the island's most infamous family, and Phillips, an exiled teen criminal who hears the voices of the dead, must dodge everyone from federal agents to long-dead alchemists as they work to uncover the secrets of the new Lost Colony. The one thing they can't dodge is each other.

Blackwood is a dark, witty coming of age story that combines America's oldest mystery with a thoroughly contemporary romance.

More on the new YA imprint from Angry Robot at io9.

2. I have just started Delia Sherman's Freedom Maze for my April column and have to tell you, as soon as I read the line about how "horses sweat but women glow", Ms Sherman had me heart and soul. That is such a classic southern saying - one that was used with no small amount of snark when I was growing up - (Lord do you sweat sitting on the vinyl seats of a car with no air conditions - LORD DO YOU SWEAT!). I feel like I'm already halfway home with this one. Looking forward to reading and reviewing it.

3. I have now read both of Elizabeth Hand's upcoming titles, the adult mystery Available Dark and the teen urban fantasy Radiant Days. I was already staggered by her previous publishing duet - the YA title Illyria and the mystery Generation Loss but now....well now I am in a place of abject joy. Radiant Days will be in my April column an I'll be writing about both books here soon (still getting my thoughts in order), but if you are a writer interested at all in your craft then you should read the work of Elizabeth Hand. Her use of language is stunning but it's how she manages to switch so easily from the brittle brutality of Available Dark to the lush romance of creativity unbound in Radiant Days that so impressed me. In a perfect world, this would be the author with the seven figure contract and massive amounts of press coverage. For now you'll just have to take my word for it (along with all the early reviews including a star from Booklist for Available Dark) and make a point of seeking out these titles. (Dark is the sequel to Generation Loss - it stands alone okay but is better if you read them in order.)

4. Yesterday I received an email from an 82 year old gentleman who checked my book out of the library in Baltimore and wanted me to know that he enjoyed it very much. How awesome is that?

5. Finally, I'm working on an essay about Nome and the early flights there, the town's position in the Alaska myth pantheon and how we used to fly convicts into the farthest north prison in the US (not a surprise that this is in Alaska, is it?). Also, Balto wasn't supposed to be the final lead dog on the serum run; his musher refused to stop when he was supposed to. Basically, Togo, who led the far more difficult portion of the race, was robbed. (My essay is not about Togo but I can't write about Nome without mentioning him.)

An old photo of a box and the story it played in my family's history

In 1924, when he was ten years old, my great uncle Thomas was nearly burned to death. Thomas and several of his friends were playing in a vacant lot down the street from their apartment building in the Bronx when they discovered this large discarded wooden box. According to my grandmother there were paint cans of some kind in the box and the paint caught on fire. There was always a lot of confusion about how the fire happened - none of the boys had matches (which would have been hard for them to come by) so the theory was "autocombustibility" or paint soaked rags slowly burning and then flaming up when the boys opened the box's lid. Regardless of the cause, Thomas became caught up in it and began burning alive. The other children understandably panicked and began running and screaming. My grandmother, who was only five and not with the boys but back at their building, remembered the screams and remembered also the sight of her father running for the lot and saving her brother's life.

Thomas Lennon, who for all his struggles with alcohol and resultant broken promises, loved his children more than life itself. Every one of them spoke of him the same way for decades after he died. He was a man who disappointed his family, a man who could have been so much, yet also a man who adored them and they adored in return. On this particular day, Thomas Lennon grabbed his son and threw him to the ground and extinguished the flames. Then he carried his little boy home where his screams continued for a very long time.

More than putting out the fire, it is what happened in the days that follow which is the true miracle. The doctor came to the house and determined that little Thomas's survival was a precious thing indeed. Nothing was certain. His wounds had to be cleaned constantly to stave off infection. The pain was so great that the child could not bear to be touched and yet that was clearly necessary. The only one who could tend to his wounds was his father, something my grandmother echoed a few years later when she nearly died from tetanus*. Thomas Lennon tended to his boy with a sweetness that was without compare. Little Thomas survived, and thrived, and lived a good long life. His father, sadly, was gone less than ten years later. But Thomas lived and really, that alone (without all the other many stories) is testament to how much a father's love can achieve.

How a photograph of the box came to be taken, and how it ended up with my great grandparents is a mystery. It is an 8 1/2 by 11 inch picture - large for the time and certainly something they could not afford. (Nor did they own a camera.) The tag hanging from the lock is also strange. It seems to include an address which is familiar to me so perhaps it was part of some investigation from the fire or police departments that notes the box's location at the time of the accident? Regardless we have it now along with a note from grandmother with the details, which is really what matters. Without that note, and if my mother and I had not heard this story many times, then this would just be some strange random picture of a box. I would never know about the day my great grandfather was a hero or the son whose life he saved.

Stories matter, don't they? We would not know who we are without them.

(Now that it is scanned in, I will be sending the original of the box to my mother's cousin, Thomas' son.)

*I should note that my great grandmother was an exemplary mother and very conscientious in the care of her children. However, Thomas Lennon had a special touch when his children were ill. My grandmother told me that the pain she suffered from tetanus (which they referred to as lockjaw) was so great that the bed on which she laid could not be touched without causing her agony. Yet again, it was her father who tended to her. Only he could touch her, she said. Only he did not make her cry. He had a gift for tenderness, which his children never forgot.

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"

Nominated for an Oscar for animation short, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" is gorgeous. It was written by William Joyce who is also the co-director. As I am a HUGE fan of Mr. Joyce's (Dinosaur Bob! Rolie Polie Olie! Wilbur Robinson! SANTA CALLS!!!!!), I had to see it and having seen it I have to spread the word.

Watch the clip then go to itunes where you can download the 15 minute film for free through Oscar night.

Oh - wait - here's what it's about:



That story became the film, which is about not only a man who gives his life to books, but also the books that give back. The story, at turns bleak and bright, follows book lover Morris Lessmore as a windy force of nature leaves his town in shambles, blowing him "Oz" tornado style to a land where he discovers a library of lively books and becomes their caretaker.

You can read more in the LA Times. Then go to itunes and download!!